Tag: Brain

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Entertainment

Famed Conductor, Citing Mind Tumor, Withdraws From Concert events

Famed Conductor, Citing Brain Tumor, Withdraws From Concerts

The renowned conductor Michael Tilson Thomas announced on Friday that he would withdraw from performances for the next several months as he recovers from surgery to treat a brain tumor.

Thomas, 76, the former music director of the San Francisco Symphony, said in a statement that he would take a hiatus through October as he undergoes treatment. He said doctors recently discovered the tumor and advised he have surgery immediately. He described the surgery, which took place at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center, as successful.

“I deeply regret missing projects that I was greatly anticipating,” Thomas said in the statement. “I look forward to seeing everyone again in November.”

Thomas, an eminent figure in the music industry known by the nickname M.T.T., stepped down as the San Francisco Symphony’s music director last year. He had held the post since 1995 and was widely credited with transforming the ensemble into one of the best in the nation and championing works by modern American composers.

Thomas said in the statement that he was canceling his participation in a starry concert with the National Symphony Orchestra in September to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Center, as well as appearances with the New World Symphony, a training orchestra for young artists in Miami that he helped found; the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, where he was to lead his “Agnegram” alongside works by Beethoven and Copland; and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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Health

Dr. J. Allan Hobson, Who Studied the Dreaming Mind, Dies at 88

Dr. J. Allan Hobson, Who Studied the Dreaming Brain, Dies at 88

“In the psychoanalytic world, there has been this tendency to assume that everything is psychodynamic,” he added, noting that some doctors reflexively blamed mothers for their children’s behavior.

But dr. Hobson tempered his views in his later years.

“He came to believe that psychoanalysis could be useful in treating mental disorders,” said Dr. Lydic, “but he did not believe in rigid symbolism when interpreting dreams.”

For the most part, Dr. Hobson still, as the saying goes, a cigar is just a cigar.

John Allan Hobson was born on June 3, 1933 in Hartford, Conn. His mother Ann (Cotter) Hobson was a housewife. His father, John Robert Hobson, was a lawyer.

John attended Loomis School, now the Loomis Chaffee School, in Windsor, Connecticut, where he graduated in 1951. He spent a year abroad, then returned to study at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he majored in English and graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1959.

In 1956 he married Joan Harlowe; they divorced in 1992. In the mid-1990s he married Dr. Rosalia Silvestri, and she outlives him.

In addition to his wife and daughter, Dr. Hobson’s four sons, Ian, Christopher, Andrew, and Matthew; his brother Bruce; and four grandchildren.

After studying medicine, Dr. Hobson did a two year internship at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. Instead of military service, he served in the Public Health Service of the National Institutes of Health.

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Health

Tapping Into the Mind to Assist a Paralyzed Man Communicate

Tapping Into the Brain to Help a Paralyzed Man Speak

For years, Pancho communicated by spelling out words on a computer using a pointer attached to a baseball cap, an arduous method that allowed him to type about five correct words per minute.

“I had to bend/lean my head forward, down, and poke a key letter one-by-one to write,” he emailed.

Last year, the researchers gave him another device involving a head-controlled mouse, but it is still not nearly as fast as the brain electrodes in the research sessions.

Through the electrodes, Pancho communicated 15 to 18 words per minute. That was the maximum rate the study allowed because the computer waited between prompts. Dr. Chang says faster decoding is possible, although it’s unclear if it will approach the pace of typical conversational speech: about 150 words per minute. Speed is a key reason the project focuses on speaking, tapping directly into the brain’s word production system rather than hand movements involved in typing or writing.

“It’s the most natural way for people to communicate,” he said.

Pancho’s buoyant personality has helped the researchers navigate challenges, but also occasionally makes speech recognition uneven.

“I sometimes can’t control my emotions and laugh a lot and don’t do too good with the experiment,” he emailed.

Dr. Chang recalled times when, after the algorithm successfully identified a sentence, “you could see him visibly shaking and it looked like he was kind of giggling.” When that happened or when, during the repetitive tasks, he’d yawn or get distracted, “it didn’t work very well because he wasn’t really focused on getting those words. So, we’ve got some things to work on because we obviously want it to work all the time.”

The algorithm sometimes confused words with similar phonetic sounds, identifying “going” as “bring,” “do” as “you,” and words beginning with “F” — “faith,” “family,” “feel” — as a V-word, “very.”

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Health

New Covid research hints at long-term lack of mind tissue, Dr. Scott Gottlieb warns

U.S. potentially facing ‘perpetual infection’ of Covid, says Gottlieb

Dr. Scott Gottlieb warned on Thursday of the potential for long-term brain loss related to Covid, citing a new study from the UK.

“In short, the study suggests that there could be long-term loss of brain tissue from Covid, and that would have some long-term consequences,” said the former FDA chief and CNBC employee.

“You could compensate for that over time, so the symptoms of it may go away, but you will never get the tissue back if the virus actually destroys it,” said Gottlieb, serving on the board of Covid vaccine maker Pfizer.

The UK study looked at brain imaging before and after coronavirus infection, specifically looking at the potential effects on the nervous system.

Gottlieb told CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” that the destruction of brain tissue could explain why Covid patients have lost their sense of smell.

“The decrease in the amount of cortical tissue happened by chance in regions of the brain that are near the places responsible for the odor,” he said. “What it suggests is that the odor, the loss of smell, is just an effect of a more primary process that is going on, and that process is actually the shrinking of the cortical tissue.”

Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC employee and a member of the board of directors of Pfizer, genetic testing startup Tempus, health technology company Aetion Inc., and biotechnology company Illumina.

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Health

Her Sister Died of a Mind Tumor. Now She Was Having Comparable Signs.

Her Sister Died of a Brain Tumor. Now She Was Having Similar Symptoms.

Humanity has planted flags on the moon, but a moon shot for brain cancer has yet to be realized.

Diagnosis known, we gradually stopped removing more tumor. The more tumor you remove, the longer the average survival time, however lean it may be. But the pursuit of surgical perfection sometimes comes at a cost. In the brain, where critical human functions are packed into millimeters of tissue, removing more tumors and potentially damaging healthy tissue risks loss of strength, speech, eyesight, memory, and more. In glioblastoma, tumor cells that are inches away from the tumor mass and far beyond the reach of tweezers almost guarantee the cancer will recur. Surgical perfection is imperfect. She wanted to keep her strength.

We sewed the dura shut and then re-plated its bone. We carefully closed the layers of her skin. A short time later she was extubated and we took her to our neurological intensive care unit to recover.

“I have seven years to spend with my sister, and a lot of young people die these days, so I try to be pragmatic,” she had told me the day before. Negotiate.

Forty years ago, the median survival time for glioblastoma was four and a half months. Since then, researchers have characterized the genetics of glioblastoma and studied various vaccines, chemotherapy, immunotherapies, cell therapies, new imaging modalities, targeted radiation therapies, and innovative forms of drug delivery to treat the disease. Lots of steps.

The median survival time is now around 15 months. Only a small percentage of patients survive more than five years.

Defeatism is a common feeling among neurosurgeons, but you remain determined, for your patients and for yourself. The next morning our patient was in a good mood, recovered well, with good strength. We carefully shared the diagnosis with her.

“Just my luck,” she said with a smile. She seemed to be expecting it.

Some sibling cancers can be explained by genetics. But that’s not the case with glioblastoma. As for her sister and many others, it was really just bad luck.

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Health

Jessica Morris, Whose Mind Most cancers Was Her Trigger, Dies at 57

Jessica Morris, Whose Brain Cancer Was Her Cause, Dies at 57

Through the nonprofit Our Brain Bank she founded, Ms. Morris encouraged more than just treating the tumor.

“If you are suddenly told that you have a disease that is considered incurable,” she said in the Human Guinea Pig Project podcast in 2019, “the only thing you urgently need is psychological support, and it’s not there.”

She also wanted to make sure patients had access to second opinions and funding so that those who were told by a doctor “nothing can be done” could take a more aggressive approach if they so wished. She herself took several novel approaches, her husband said, including an experimental therapy suggested by one of her doctors that injects herpes virus into the tumor in hopes of stimulating an immune response.

“Even if I don’t know exactly how certain treatments might work – and nobody really knows – it makes sense to block as many routes to cancer as possible,” Ms. Morris said on the podcast.

Another goal was to make it easier for glioblastoma patients to participate in clinical trials with drugs and therapies. Access to such studies can be tedious and frustrating for patients with limited life expectancy. And since glioblastoma is a complex disease in which each tumor has different characteristics, Ms. Morris and her organization have developed an app that patients can use to report symptoms and share information with each other and with medical professionals – to better understand the disease.

“Patient symptom data is a largely untapped pool of information that can inform researchers so they can better develop treatments,” Ms. Morris said during a 2019 panel discussion on patient-centered treatments. “Involving patients in this process has the added benefit of making people with the disease feel like they are dealing with the disease, and not the other way around.”

Jessica Jane Morris was born on July 22nd, 1963 in Greenwich near London. Her father Bill was an architect and her mother Elizabeth (Villar) Morris is an artist.

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World News

Neuralink cofounder Max Hodak leaves Elon Musk’s mind implant firm

Neuralink cofounder Max Hodak leaves Elon Musk's brain implant company

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and chief executive officer of Tesla, waves as he arrives for a discussion at the Satellite 2020 conference in Washington, DC on Monday, March 9, 2020.

Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Neuralink President Max Hodak announced on Saturday via Twitter that he is no longer with the health tech company he founded together with Elon Musk and has not been for a few weeks. He did not disclose the circumstances of his departure.

Neuralink, headquartered in Fremont, California, is developing “ultra-high-bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect people and computers,” according to the company’s self-description on LinkedIn.

Musk, who is also CEO of electric car maker Tesla and aerospace defense company SpaceX, said without providing evidence that Neuralink’s devices could enable “superhuman perception” and enable paralyzed people to use their smartphones or robotic limbs to operate heads one day and “resolve” autism and schizophrenia.

Neuralink was founded in 2016 and invests tens of millions of his significant personal wealth. Neuralink is also developing surgical robotics to implant its devices. Essentially, tiny wires about a quarter the diameter of a human hair are sewn to connect the implants to the brain.

Skeptics abound.

Musk described the surgery to insert a Neuralink device as less than an hour.

Neuralink demo

Following the August 2020 demo, MIT Technology Review viewed Neuralink in a devastating rendition of the presentation as “neuroscientific theater”.

Musk doesn’t have a background in neuroscience or medical devices, but according to a project leader at Neuralink quoted by the New York Times in 2019, he has “actively sought to solve the technical challenges Neuralink is facing”.

On the medical news site StatNews, a neuroethicist and doctor named Anna Wexler wrote in a comment on April 7, 2021:

“In this new world of private neurotech development, corporate demos are streamed live on YouTube and have a taste of techno-optimism that includes proclamations about a future we haven’t seen yet – but one that we’re sure we will Data is sparse; rhetoric about making the world a better place is difficult. “

The next day, in a series of tweets without providing evidence, Musk wrote:

“With the first @Neuralink product, someone with paralysis can use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone who uses their thumbs

“Later versions will be able to route signals from neural links in the brain to neural links in motor / sensory neuron clusters in the body, enabling paraplegics, for example, to walk again

The device is wirelessly implanted flush with the skull and charged so that you look and feel completely normal. “

On Saturday, Hodak was not immediately available for comment.

For Musk, Saturday was undoubtedly a day when he needed to focus more on his aerospace company, SpaceX. After 167 days in space, astronauts with crew, SpaceX and NASA began their return flight home, with a “splashdown” expected around 2:57 am

One of Hodak’s followers on Twitter asked him what was coming next and he replied, “Not Jurassic Park.” The joke was a reference to an earlier fantastic discussion on the microblogging platform in which Hodak thought, “We could probably build a Jurassic Park if we wanted. Wouldn’t be a genetically authentic dinosaur, but maybe 15 years of breeding + engineering.” Get super exotic novel species. “

Neuralink is one of many medical technology companies working on so-called “brain-machine interfaces”.

Competitors include developers of implants and non-invasive devices such as headsets. These include Kernel, Synchron, Neurable and even Facebook in the USA, CereGate in Germany and Mindmaze in Switzerland.

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Health

ATAI takes majority stake in mind laptop interface start-up Psyber

Peter Thiel-backed psychedelics start-up ATAI targets schizophrenia

ATAI Life Sciences, a Peter Thiel-supported biopharmaceutical company developing psychedelics for the treatment of mental health, has acquired a majority stake in the US company Psyber.

Psyber is a company that wants to use brain-computer interfaces to treat people with mental illness.

ATAI, calling itself a drug development platform, was founded to acquire, incubate, and develop psychedelics and other drugs that can be used to treat depression, anxiety, addiction, and other mental illnesses.

The Berlin-based company, which was founded in 2018 by entrepreneurs Christian Angermayer, Florian Brand, Lars Wilde and Srinivas Rao, announced its majority stake in Psyber on Wednesday. It declined to reveal what it was offering Psyber in exchange for the majority stake.

In theory, a brain-computer interface enables direct communication between a human brain and an external device.

ATAI said that Psyber’s brain-computer interface technology, which is in its early stages of development, could one day help patients understand how drugs affect activity in their brain while improving the effectiveness and safety of their drugs.

ATAI said it will combine the development of its psychedelic compounds with the ability to record electrical activity in the brain to interpret emotional, behavioral and mental states in real time.

“By combining medicine and BCI-assisted therapy, the patient sits firmly in the driver’s seat as it is tailored to the specific needs of each individual,” said David Keene, director of digital therapy at Atai, in a statement.

Prahlad Krishnan, CEO of Psyber, said BCI has the potential to “change the world” as we know it.

“In the context of mental health, this is no exception, as each patient participating in BCI-based therapy has greater autonomy and is increasingly able to change their feelings and behaviors in order to improve their quality of life,” said Krishnan.

ATAI, which has around 50 employees in offices in Berlin, New York and San Diego, currently works with 14 companies focused on drug development and other technologies. In return for a controlling stake in the drugs and technologies they develop, ATAI helps scientists raise money, work with regulators, and conduct clinical trials. None of ATAI’s drugs have yet been officially approved by regulatory agencies.

Billionaire Thiel initiated a $ 125 million round of investments in ATAI last November and a $ 157 million round of investments in the company in March. According to two sources close to ATAI, an IPO is now planned in the next few weeks.

“The great virtue of ATAI is taking mental illness as seriously as we should have,” said Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, in a statement shared with CNBC last November. “The company’s most valuable asset is its urgency.”

Thiel is a business partner of ATAI co-founder Angermayer and both have made a number of investments together. Beyond investing, it is not immediately clear whether Thiel plays a significant role at ATAI.

“We were introduced back in 2011 because we are both very interested in global politics,” said Angermayer, referring to his first meeting with Thiel, who was born in Germany. “I know many politicians as friends. During the euro crisis, I became a bit of a point of contact for many Americans and Asians who didn’t understand Europe at all. How complicated we are, but also how positive we are.”

Elon’s Neuralink

Elon Musk, who co-founded PayPal with Peter Thiel in 1998, founded a brain-computer interface company called Neuralink.

Musk describes it as a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires going into your brain.

Earlier this year, Musk said in an interview that Neuralink wired a monkey to use his mind to play video games.

A YouTube video showing the monkey playing the arcade game pong with his mind was shared by Neuralink on Friday.

Last August, Neuralink conducted a live demo of its technology on three pigs. An audience was shown real-time neural signals from one of the pigs Musk named Gertrude.

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Health

Yehuda Ben-Yishay, Pioneer in Treating Mind Accidents, Dies at 88

Yehuda Ben-Yishay, Pioneer in Treating Brain Injuries, Dies at 88

Yehuda Ben-Yishay was born on February 11, 1933 in Cluj, a city in the Transylvania region in western Romania. His father, Chaim Ben-Yishay, was a businessman; his mother Leah (Finkelstein) Ben-Yishay was a seamstress.

His family survived the Second World War largely unscathed. Although hundreds of thousands of fellow Romanian Jews died during the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands survived, especially in the southern part of Transylvania, where the family had moved just before the war.

The Ben-Yishays were zealous Zionists and in 1946 boarded a converted cattle ship with about 2,000 other Jews heading for Palestine. The British authorities had banned such mass migration and when Yehuda arrived he and his two brothers and sisters were separated from their parents when they were taken to refugee camps.

After Israel gained independence in 1948, Dr. Ben-Yishay in Nahal, part of the Israel Defense Forces that established agricultural settlements. He later attended the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the hope of studying psychology, but there was no one to teach it: Arab guerrillas had murdered the department head and several colleagues in 1948.

Dr. Ben-Yishay studied sociology instead, graduating in 1957. He received a scholarship to the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and arrived at the end of the year.

To cover his living expenses, he taught Hebrew and worked with retirees, including at a summer camp in Brewster, NY. There he met Myrna Pitterman know. They married in 1960 and had three sons, Ari, Ron and Seth. All survive him along with his brothers Israel and Meir; his sister Pnina; and eight grandchildren.

At the New School, Dr. Ben-Yishay headed by a German emigrant psychologist named Kurt Goldstein. Dr. Goldstein insisted that patients with traumatic injuries could only recover in a “holistic” setting that would take into account not only their physical well-being but also their emotional and spiritual health.

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Health

She Suffered Stability Points for Years. Was It a Mind Tumor?

She Suffered Balance Issues for Years. Was It a Brain Tumor?

But when he saw the dental CT, he immediately ordered a conventional CT of her head. The dental scan is designed to get a three dimensional image of the jaw and teeth so it cannot be expected to show the entire skull. Full CT confirmed that there was a small mass in the left sinus. Based on her appearance, her doctor suspected it was a remnant of an infection from the years before. But on the right side was something else: a mass the size of a strawberry had destroyed much of the mastoid bone just behind her ear. It was in the same location as the much smaller abnormality seen in the first few years of MRI. Now it was big enough to compress one of the vessels that led to the jugular vein. The radiologist said it looked like an infection. Or possibly a rare type of bone cancer.

Since cancer was possible, the patient decided she needed a second opinion. She reached out to the Mayo Clinic’s Arizona office in Phoenix, and two weeks later she was supposed to be Dr. Visit Peter Weisskopf. Weisskopf listened as the patient described the dizziness, tinnitus, and hearing loss, as well as debilitating fatigue and the terrible feeling of impending doom. “I’m not sure this mass could be causing all of this,” he said, but he agreed that an MRI would provide important diagnostic information. He suspected that she had something known as a cholesteatoma. These are benign cell growths that become trapped in the ear – or rarely, as in this patient’s case – in the brain and begin to grow. Sometimes these cells are imported into the ear after a chronic infection, but most of the time they stay there during the development of the fetus.

Weisskopf checked the MRI. As expected, the brain tissue showed up as light and dark gray stripes, surrounded by fluid that appears black. But just behind this patient’s ear, embedded in the lower edge of the mastoid bone of the skull, was a large bright white cloud. Because of this appearance, Weisskopf knew what she had. It was a cholesteatoma. Although this is not a cancer, these types of tumors need to be removed. If they stay in place, they will continue to enlarge until they cause real problems. The patient really wanted to have the thing removed. She was sure that it must be behind the symptoms she had been living with over the years.

Removing the bulk required two surgeries, the second late last spring. But it was worth it, the patient told me. The worst symptoms have completely disappeared. Her tiredness and feelings of oppression and doom disappeared after the first operation. But even after the second she still has the tinnitus, which is sometimes very loud. She still has problems with her balance. Your hearing is not as good as it used to be.

Weisskopf does not believe that the mass caused the patient’s symptoms. The patient respectfully disagrees; Where it really matters, with her mood, her well-being, she feels back to something like her old self. And while her doctor can’t make the connection, she’s sure it all came from this growth, which she thought might not have been quite as harmless as her doctors and textbooks say.

Lisa Sanders, MD is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her latest book is Diagnosis: Solving the Most Confusing Medical Mysteries. When you have a resolved case you like Dr. To tell Sanders, write to Lisa at .Sandersmd @ gmail.com.